"Council to pay for homes to be built for the homeless in Coventry"

[dutchman]

The authority will give away land and fund building new bedrooms



One and two bedroom extensions on Whitefriars social housing properties will be paid for by taxpayers in a bid to tackle homelessness.

The new project could save Coventry City Council up to £2m a year it currently shells out on hotels and B&Bs for homeless families in the city.

In 2019/20 the authority had budgeted to spend £6.1m on temporary accommodation.

Rising costs are placing a heavy strain on the council’s budget at a time the council is having to make £10.2m worth of cuts in the next financial year.

Measures to tackle this are being drawn up, including the new partnership with housing group Whitefriars.

The arrangement will see the council foot the bill to provide “one or two bedroom extensions” on Whitefriars’ existing social housing stock, which will be used to house homeless families.

Cllr John Mutton, cabinet member for finance, said at a pre-budget briefing on Monday: “We have agreed the principle of it and discussions are still ongoing.

“They will be smaller garage sites or brownfield land too small for major development.

“We have got loads of little sites like that that we would be prepared to release at no cost purely so we can get people out of the B&Bs and temporary accommodation and that in itself saves the council money.

“The extensions will cost between £10,000 to £15,000 so if we did seven or eight houses we would be up to the thousands.”

Plans to trial the scheme with an extension on a property in Willenhall are already taking shape.

“The land really is worth next to nothing as it cannot be built on,” added Cllr Mutton.

The extensions will help provide accommodation for some of the 400 homeless families in Coventry.

Cllr Mutton added: “If we can get half of these people in proper family accommodation we can be saving a couple of million pounds a year.”

The council is currently spending as much as £100 a night placing people into temporary accommodation.

But it expects to see its £6.1m budget reduce to £5.1m by 2020/21 as a result of the Whitefriars project and others, including a five-year lease of Caradoc Hall in Caradoc Close, Henley Green, which is costing the council £1.7m in rent to put 120 single people into more suitable accommodation.